Around midday, with the sun beginning to fry his brain, Findhorn was relieved to see a sign for Los Alamos.
'Most people like Los Alamos,' White was saying over a ninety-mile-an-hour wind. 'It looks for all the world like any university town. One thing about it you should remember, though.'
'The security?' Findhorn asked, his hair being pulled at the roots.
'The altitude. It's nearly eight thousand feet up. Unless you're acclimatised to that, you can't run.'
'Why would I want to run?'
White gave him a ghoulish grin. He dropped his speed, went down a gear, and in minutes they were trickling past pink and green adobe houses, and more jewellery and rugs. Near the town centre, the nuclear physicist squeezed his Corvette in between a battered yellow Oldsmobile and a string of motorcycles.
'Some people describe Los Alamos as the world's greatest concentration of nerds,' White complained. 'This is a grave injustice to Berkeley, California. But one thing missing from this community is mediocrity. It makes for a kinda skewed population.'
They were in the Blue Adobe on Central Avenue. It had walls three feet thick, and canned mariachi music, and the best air conditioning in the known Universe. Memorabilia and photographs from the Manhattan Project lined the walls. They had been lucky to find a spare booth in the crowded little restaurant. 'We have so many PhDs — the highest per capita population on Earth — that unless you're a physician you're called plain Mister. Outsiders paint us as overachievers, pressuring our kids, neglecting our wives.'
Findhorn, sensing an open sore, steered White back to the point. 'Petrosian…' he began.
A small, Hispanic waitress approached. She gave White a radiant smile.
'Rosa, my beautiful, what about a late breakfast?' asked White.
'For you, Francis, there are huevos rancheros, huevos borrachos or omelette.'
White translated: 'Ed, you can have eggs with green chillies, eggs with red chillies or an omelette. It comes with chillies.'
'I'll have a fried egg,' Findhorn said. On the wall opposite was a 1940s milk box from the Hillside dairy — From Moo to You was printed on its side. He added, 'And a glass of milk.'
'Me too,' White said. When Rosa had gone he said, 'To resume. Anything Petrosian did in the 1950s is ancient history. You're talking fifty-year-old physics. Holy moly, Ed, that was before quarks, gluons, QCD, string theory, superstrings. It was the steam age of nuclear physics.'
Findhorn mopped his brow. It felt hot to the touch. He took a shorthand notebook out of his pocket. 'How many particle types do you have?'
'Twenty-five. Everything you see around you, the whole caboodle — even the delectable Rosa — is governed by twenty-five fundamental particles. Don't ask me why twenty-five and not seven or fifteen. Nobody knows.'
'But still you have a theory for all this, the standard model. I never got beyond electrons, protons and neutrons, and of course light particles — photons.'
White nodded. 'The old timers. Use them as building blocks and you have water, C02, DNA, coal for your fire, brick for your house, gas for your car and medicine for your kids. The whole of chemistry comes out of combining just these four particles. Imagine Rosa as a shimmering mass of atomic particles.'
'So who needs the other twenty-one — quarks and the like?'
'You do.' White waved at the sunlight pouring in through the big windows. 'Unless you want to go around like some primordial slime, in pitch-black at absolute zero. Sunlight depends on nuclear fusion, right? Hydrogen combining to give helium with the mass surplus going off as energy? So how do the protons — hydrogen nuclei to you — combine?'
Rosa reappeared with plates of food covered with a red dust. 'You want more chilli on that?'
'People are big on chilli hereabouts,' advised White.
Findhorn nodded, and Rosa sprinkled a generous helping over his fried egg, which, in addition to the red dust, had come with a coating of red and green chillies and a blue corn tortilla. He said, 'I recall that the intense heat you get in the middle of stars is the same as you get in an A-bomb and this heat causes hydrogen atoms to fuse together. This fusing constitutes the transmutation of elements and when that happens it releases even more heat, whence the hydrogen bomb.'
'I'm asking you, why does the heat make the atoms merge?'
Findhorn shrugged, and White said, 'It's a lot of stuff about an up-quark converting to a down-quark and a hip bone connecting to a thigh bone. Then you're into the other twenty-one particles. But my point is this, Ed: you don't need to know. Because Petrosian didn't know either. Like I said, they were developing the Bomb in the steam age, when people hadn't gotten beyond nuclear binding energies.'
'I'm trying to follow you,' Findhorn said. Sweat was breaking out of his brow: he had started on his egg.
White waved a fork in the air. 'What I'm getting at is that Petrosian's world is understood. There's nothing new to be said about it. It's been raked over by three generations of physicists and all that can possibly be known about it is known.'
The restaurant was beginning to fill up with early lunchers. A bespectacled young man sat down at the table opposite them. He looked like an outdoors type, dressed in blue denim and with long, blond hair tied back in a pony-tail. In any other situation, Findhorn would never have noticed him. 'You're telling me that Petrosian can't possibly have discovered anything relevant to modern science.'
White nodded his agreement. 'Petrosian's world was one of protons, neutrons and electrons. Any discovery he made in that area would long since have been rediscovered by someone else. There are no surprises left in the nuclear energies the Los Alamos pioneers worked at.'
'And the new particles? The other twenty-one?'
'To see the exotic stuff, the quarks and so on, you have to look at cosmic rays on the way in or go to heavy atom smashers. These machines cost megabucks and they didn't even exist in Petrosian's day. Nobody could have predicted the world they uncovered. Any idea of the Lone Ranger getting some brilliant insight that leaped across three generations of nuclear scientists — look, it's nuts. Forget it.'
Rosa was bearing down at ram speed, wielding a bowl of chilli. Findhorn, in panic, asked for coffee. It took her by surprise and she retreated back to the kitchen.
On an impulse, Findhorn tried a gamble. He studied White closely and said, 'So how did the rumour get around?'
'What rumour?' White was looking genuinely blank.
'That Petrosian had discovered some new process.'
White's hesitation was tiny. It might just have been something to do with a throatful of Rosa's chillies. He tried to laugh, to cover it up. 'What sort of process? Where did you hear that?'
Findhorn touched the side of his nose, probed a little more. 'My source thinks there was a cover-up.'
White shook his head in annoyance. 'Sure, there's nothing like a cover-up story to sell newspapers. I suspect like the Roswell UFO incident, one or two bits of real information get distorted. Alien spacecraft, the face on Mars, energy from nothing, you name it, there's an audience out there eager to buy your conspiracy theory. And the more screwball it is the bigger your audience.' White tried a sympathetic tone. 'Look, Ed, this stuff's for our National Enquirer, not the English Times. Whoever your source is, this story about some new process has no foundation. No foundation in history, no foundation in science.'
'I'm chasing a chimera, then?'
'Absolutely.'
Findhorn tried to look convinced. 'What could have gotten the rumour started?'
White shrugged. 'You tell me.'